But banning phone use can’t hurt, can it?
There is no upside in having phones in classrooms. Unless they’re being used for a particular lesson, they’re just a distraction.
Think about how distracting they are to you, how tempting it is to check Facebook and Insta and your emails and watch a clip- and you’re an adult. It's so much worse for kids whose brains are still forming.
Frankly, we can’t leave it to them to self-regulate- we adults have got to do it for them.
It says a lot that most of the states in Australia are doing it already. They seem to be several steps ahead of us in trying to sort out education, so surely if they think it's necessary, we should be thinking it too.
And it also says a lot that a major UN report recommended it too, just last month.
My only reservation with this policy from the Nats is that I wouldn’t want anyone to kid themselves that this solves the education problem. It won’t. It's helpful, but our problems are bigger than this.
We have got to get all the primary school kids learning phonics again, so they can actually start learning to read.
We’ve got to make sure the Education Ministry leaves gravity in the science curriculum.
We've got to get the kids out of those giant shared classrooms, so they stop being distracted by each other.
And we’ve got to stop sending them home at the drop of a hat.
I'm looking for policies that deal with those problems, and I cannot wait to see what the parties are offering. This makes a nice start though.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show.
4 comments:
Ban 5G cell towers first. These are military grade weapon systems which have nothing to do with telecommunications.
We sould ban the MOE, the NZCER and all the self flagellating wonky academics and teachers who think education is more about lived experience or tiki wearing than STEM.
That would definitively fix education.
Erica Stanford presents National education's ideas in an interview on Reality Check Radio. There are some good ideas there.
Jan Tinetti's view on cell phones is consistent with waffley progressive ideas inferring students should learn phone management themselves. You can tell she hasn't much idea of teenage behaviour or classroom management in general.
Nor is she facing up to the educational fiasco we have.
Phones in school absolutely need to go, for we have, and are creating, generations of physically overweight, intellectual lightweights. Banning them is a damned good idea, and parents need to limit their use after hours so kids get the requisite exercise and sleep, and are not bombarded with nonsense and unnecessary social trauma.
The curriculum re-refresh, that is now so urgently needed, is an entirely different issue, but is similarly afflicted with severely degenerative elements. We need to do way better!
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